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Wednesday, July 2, 2014

How Traffic Shaping Can Help the NSA Evade Legal Oversight

New research paper
on how the NSA can evade legal prohibitions against collecting Internet
data and metadata on Americans by forcing domestic traffic to leave and
return to the US. The general technique is called "traffic shaping,"
and has legitimate uses in network management.
From a news article:

The Obama administration previously said there had been
Congressional and Judicial oversight of these surveillance laws --
notably Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which authorized the collection
of Americans' phone records; and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA), which authorized the controversial PRISM
program to access non-U.S. residents' emails, social networking, and
cloud-stored data.
But the researchers behind this new study say that the
lesser-known Executive Order (EO) 12333, which remains solely the domain
of the Executive Branch -- along with United States Signals
Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18, designed to regulate the collection
of American's data from surveillance conducted on foreign soil -- can be
used as a legal basis for vast and near-unrestricted domestic
surveillance on Americans.
The legal provisions offered under EO 12333, which the researchers
say "explicitly allows for intentional targeting of U.S. persons" for
surveillance purposes when FISA protections do not apply, was the basis
of the authority that reportedly allowed the NSA to tap into the fiber cables that connected Google and Yahoo's overseas to U.S. data centers.
An estimated 180 million user records,
regardless of citizenship, were collected from Google and Yahoo data
centers each month, according to the leaked documents. The program,
known as Operation MUSCULAR, was authorized because the collection was
carried out overseas and not on U.S. soil, the researchers say.
The paper also said surveillance can also be carried out across the
wider Internet by routing network traffic overseas so it no longer falls
within the protection of the Fourth Amendment.